Lornah Kiplagat

Inventing Herself and a Better World

"Someone must speak out for the little girl with no voice. And since I began as a nomad just like them, I felt it was my destiny to help them."[Waris Dirie in Desert Flower, Lornah Kiplagat’s favorite book]

Lornah Kiplagat is happy.

Her happiness pervades the atmosphere around her. She smiles easily, asks questions of others, makes people feel special.

"Everyone loves Lornah," says Mary Wittenberg, CEO of the New York Road Runners. "Lornah has a good time."

"All my people love hanging out with her," says Rafy Acosta, director of the World’s Best 10K. "My wife loves her. She has been such a perfect guest and a perfect friend. She is a great athlete and a great human being."

Some of this joy stems from success: Lornah won 10 out of 12 road races she entered last year, even though she was "taking it easy." Lornah’s happiness, however, goes well beyond athletic achievement.

"Lornah has a force about her," says Wittenberg. "When I think about Lornah, it is beyond sports. In the midst of her career, she has been able to focus on community, on others. Lornah has a bigger picture of life."

Lornah has the happiness of someone who knows who she is. She has chosen nearly everything about herself—her name, her nationality, her home, her profession, her persona—yet without repudiating her past or alienating her family, friends, neighbors and countrymen. She has become a global woman, equally at ease in rural Kenya, the center of New York City, or a comfortable suburb in Holland or the USA.

Mostly, Lornah has the happiness of one who has made her own dreams come true and helped others learn to dream and bring their dreams to life as well.

Born May 1, 1974, she was called, following the local Kenyan naming tradition, "Jebiwot," or "girl born while it was raining," as it was the rainy season. Her father, one of the oldest men in the village, held to the old traditions. Most untraditionally, however, from Lornah’s earliest memory he divided work between the boys and girls of his large family. As Lornah recalled in a PBS Frontline interview, he even went so far as to tell her, "If I see you doing something like washing clothes for your brother, I will break your hands."

Thus encouraged, young Jebiwot developed into an uppity woman. She recalls, "as a child, if I was doing something like washing, and my brother would ask me, ‘Where are the cows?’ [a common scene in male-dominated Kenyan society, she reports], I would say, ‘You’re asking me, while I’m working? You are doing nothing, you go look for the cows!’." Years later, in training camps, she refused the task of washing the men’s muddy shoes and socks, commonly the duty of female runners. And one day, she would direct the building of her own training camp, telling construction foremen when they showed up, "I’m your boss. If you can’t handle that, go." Some went.

Jebiwot grew up in the small village of Kabiemit—a place she says is "not even a village," just "several houses"—taking care of animals on her family’s farm. She knew of runners: An uncle ran in the 1972 Olympics and several other world-class runners came from her region. But it was her cousin, Susan Sirma—the first Kenyan woman to win a medal in a World Championship and one of the top road racers of the early 1990s—who really inspired her. Sirma was "something special," Lornah says. "She had run abroad, and when she came home, to see her . . . to see her train. . . I would start to shake. It was like, ‘Wow!’ We sang songs about her. We would walk around her house. When I would run after a goat, I would think, ‘Run like Susan.’ Susan was like a really big thing."

Of her childhood, Lornah remembers, "If I was sent somewhere, I was never walking, always running." Like many Kenyan youth, she ran five to eight kilometers to school and back twice a day. At noon, they would run home for lunch, the limited time requiring them to race back fast enough that they "had to concentrate." Yet young Jebiwot never even thought about running competitively, never considered herself a runner, until a few "small, small things" turned her in that direction.

She recalls a day in sixth grade when a cousin was looking at her legs and asked, "Are you running? Have you considered running?" When she said no, the cousin said, "You should try," pointing out that the arch of her foot was "formed like a runner." "Since that time," Lornah says, "I was motivated. I felt like I had the qualities of a runner."

She remembers another day, a school competition when her parents came to see her run the 10,000m and a relay. She recalls the pressure of having spectators and of feeling a bit heavy from the beans and corn she ate at lunch, but also the pleasure of doing well and the realization that it was "so much fun."

Years later, she remembers the first day that she hung with Sirma—who had once told another cousin that Lornah was too big for a runner and should pursue the shot put—for a full hour’s training run. Normally Lornah would be dropped after ten or 20 minutes. Lornah recalls, "After the run, Susan was resting her hands on her knees, and looked over at me and said, ‘Wow. If you can run like this. . .’"